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Less than half of Peterborough residents have jobs, an economist told a group of people that met Tuesday night to begin forming a Workers’ Action Centre in Peterborough.

“You cannot keep a community going on only half the community working,” said Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Yalnizyan was the keynote speaker for the Workers’ Action Centre event at the Peterborough Public Library auditorium. About 40 people attended. She talked about the employment insurance program and the economy.

Peterborough had the second highest unemployment rate in the country among cities, according to Statistics Canada, and only 49.2% of the community’s population had jobs, Yalnizyan said.

“You cannot build a city on less than half the population working,” she said.

The Statistics Canada information pegged the Peterborough Census Metropolitan Area’s unemployment rate at 9.8%, second highest among the country’s 33 largest urban centres. It trailed Saint John, N.B., which had a 9.9% unemployment rate last month.

Yalnizyan gave a broad overview of the impact of the recession.

She remarked that the country lost almost half a million good full-time jobs in the first nine months of the recession and that those jobs have been replaced largely by low-paying, temporary full-time positions.

Yalnizyan criticized the federal government for making it more difficult for people to access jobless benefits, such as employment insurance.

Only 27.3% of unemployed Canadians have access to employment insurance, she said.

And she attacked the government for changes to temporary foreign worker rules that made it possible for 300,000 temporary foreign workers to be working in Canada in December 2011.

“We could have eliminated the growth in unemployment,” she said.

A Workers’ Action Centre would give workers a place to go to ask questions about labour issues and it would serve as a lobby group for workers’ issues, such as minimum wage and access to employment insurance.

Deena Ladd, with the Workers’ Action Centre in Toronto, told the group how her organization has helped workers that were dealing with employers who wouldn’t give them their pay and how it helped temporary workers organize to fight for holiday pay that their employers wouldn’t provide.

“We take on employers who break the law, who take advantage of people,” she said.

Peterborough Careers, Peterborough Community Legal Centre, Peterborough County-City Health Unit and the United Way of Peterborough and District are among the partner agencies behind the creation of a local Workers’ Action Centre.